Our products are sourced locally and globally to obtain the best ingredients for our recipes. We buy our olive oil and unique spices from suppliers in Italy, Spain, and India.

Our pizza dough is ripened for 72 hours. We make our marinara daily from scratch in our kitchen. We start with fresh garlic, onions, and basil. We add ripened Modesto tomatoes. Finally, we add our carefully curated spices and herbs to the mix.

Process

Food Made In-House

Our kitchen is bustling. Our chefs carefully execute each recipe, following our process, ensuring the highest quality food is delivered. With 20 years of experience comes a well-designed process for running and operating each restaurant.

Whether our chefs are mixing our dough, building lasagna, or blending ricotta, they are creating each dish with care and precision every time they step into the kitchen.

Team

Customer Experience Driven

Each team member does everything possible to add value to our customers' experience. This includes working together to continually improve product quality, service, and operations.

When a customer walks into a DeSantis Restaurant Concepts establishment, they are joining our family for a meal. That means we treat each customer as we would treat our own family.

Quick Facts

1956

The year the DeSantis Family opened their first Italian restaurant

72 Hours

The time we take to proof our dough

1 Million+

The number of Lasagnas sold from our L.A. Italian Kitchen restaurants

50 Million +

The number of customers served by DeSantis Restaurant Concepts

Meet Our Founder

Joe De Santis

Founder & CEO

L.A. Italian Kitchen founder, Joseph De Santis began his career in the restaurant-food service industry at the ripe age of nine years old. While growing up, Joe’s father would take him to work at one of the family’s pizza places, Pizza Pete’s, on the weekends.

As a young man, Joe embraced the challenge and opportunity to work and learn about the restaurant business. By age sixteen, Joe was the manager of one of the larger sales volume Pizza Pete’s restaurants located in Santa Ana, California.

Like his grandparents, Joe looks to the future for growth with a fresh concept, and to serve high quality, quick service Italian food. He branched out and opened the first “L.A. Italian Kitchen” restaurant in 1991 at the Galleria at Tyler in Riverside, California. Joe, being a Los Angeles native, created the name L.A. Italian Kitchen as a reflection of his Italian heritage.

He went on to expand the DeSantis Restaurant Concepts portfolio with the addition of two FatBurger franchise locations in 2011. In 2013, Joe opened his first Social Life Pizza restaurant in San Diego, CA. Today, the DeSantis Restaurant Concepts restaurant brands consists of L.A. Italian Kitchen, FatBurger, and Social Life Pizza.